It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.
— Mary Henle
There seems to be a growing consensus that genius is all about hard work; really hard work, for at least a decade. What can motivate that kind of [...]
Filed under: Philosophy of Mind | Tagged: effort, genius, passion | 4 Comments »
People like to say that a certain book “changed their life”: The quoted phrase “book that changed my life” gets 61,000 hits on Google. I have some favourite books, but can I honestly say that one of them significantly changed my life? It seems more likely that my life has been influenced by the gestalt [...]
Filed under: Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science | Tagged: books, reading | 5 Comments »
Richard Feynman has said many wise things about the nature of scientific research. His emphasis on the importance of doubt is very insightful:
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
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I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to [...]
Filed under: Evolution, Philosophy of Science | Tagged: doubt, Fenyman | 7 Comments »
I believe that math is very important: My first paper was mathematical (How many ways can an N-dimensional hypercube be unfolded into (N-1)-dimensional space?) and my most recent paper was mathematical (How can a very large tensor be decomposed with limited RAM?). But medan agan: everything in moderation; nothing in excess. In machine learning and [...]
Filed under: Computer Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science | Tagged: AI, complexity, math, moderation | 7 Comments »
Bloggers are making poetry out of the search terms that lead people to their blogs. I had to try it myself.
Each line below, including the title, is a query that led a visitor to my blog. I adjusted the capitalization of the queries and added punctuation.
Don’t worry, I won’t quit my day job.
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Filed under: Political Science, Semantics | Tagged: poetry | 1 Comment »
I was thinking about what to say to a student who is contemplating a career in computational linguistics. How can I convey my enthusiasm? How can I explain my fascination with language? Here are some of the things that came to mind:
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Filed under: Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science | Tagged: language, meditation, Sapir-Whorf | 3 Comments »
